Panel Will Urge Broad Overhaul of Iraqi Police

Friday

Aug 31, 2007 at 5:25 AM

An independent commission will recommend remaking Iraq’s police force to purge it of Shiite militants suspected of complicity in sectarian killings, officials said.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 — An independent commission established by Congress to assess Iraq’s security forces will recommend remaking the 26,000-member national police force to purge it of corrupt officers and Shiite militants suspected of complicity in sectarian killings, administration and military officials said Thursday.

The commission, headed by Gen. James L. Jones, the former top United States commander in Europe, concludes that the rampant sectarianism that has existed since the formation of the police force requires that its current units “be scrapped” and reshaped into a smaller, more elite organization, according to one senior official familiar with the findings. The recommendation is that “we should start over,” the official said.

The report, which will be presented to Congress next week, is among a number of new Iraq assessments — including a national intelligence estimate and a Government Accountability Office report — that await lawmakers when they return from summer recess. But the Jones commission’s assessment is likely to receive particular attention as the work of a highly regarded team that was alone in focusing directly on the worthiness of Iraq’s army and police force.

Its harsh indictment of a key institution in Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government is likely to be seized on by Democrats in Congress and other critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy as further evidence that a fundamental shift in American policy is required.

However, a new attempt to disband an Iraqi force would also be risky, given the armed backlash that followed the American decision to dissolve the Iraqi Army soon after the invasion of 2003.

Bush administration officials were briefed on the report this week, and they said on Thursday that they were studying its recommendations as part of a strategy review that will include testimony next month from Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker.

Geoff Morrell, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, said that an American effort to retrain the Iraqi police forces was under way. Mr. Morrell said that Pentagon officials believed that such an effort could succeed in removing sectarianism from the ranks without requiring a complete overhaul of the Iraqi force.

“We’re not giving up on the Iraqi National Police,” Mr. Morrell said, adding that the United States and Mr. Maliki’s government were “both committed to seeing it through.”

According to several administration officials, the Jones commission also reached largely positive conclusions about the Iraqi Army’s performance since the start of the new security strategy in Iraq — a sign, several officials said, that a determined American effort to remake Iraqi institutions holds some promise of success.

The officials who agreed to discuss the commission recommendations did so in some cases because they believed that disclosing them publicly would help diffuse their impact and focus attention on the Petraeus-Crocker report. Members of the commission and their aides declined to speak about the report on Thursday.

The Jones commission, which has 14 members, including former or retired military officers, Defense Department officials and law enforcement officers, was created this year by Congress to study the Iraqi security forces and report its findings this fall. Members of the commission made three trips to Iraq and met with senior American commanders and Iraqi officials. National police units were designated earlier this year to play a major role securing neighborhoods after United States and Iraqi Army units cleared the areas of insurgents. But the police have proven to be a tenuous element of that strategy. Rampant sectarianism as well as supply and equipment problems have led to frequent complaints by the American military that the national police have been ineffective or openly allied with Shiite militants in many neighborhoods.

American commanders on the ground in Shiite-controlled areas of Baghdad say that the local police actively subvert efforts to loosen the grip of militias, and in some cases, attack Americans directly. One commander in northwest Baghdad said most bomb attacks against American patrols in the area this spring occurred close to police checkpoints.

Officers involved in training the national police units, which fall under the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry, acknowledged deep problems with the police but said that they had been working methodically for months on retraining national police units to do exactly what the Jones commission was proposing — purge them of Shiite militants and install better leaders.

Officers in Iraq said that during the course of the training effort 9 police brigade commanders and 17 battalion commanders had been relieved of duty for various acts of misconduct, in particular illegal actions of a sectarian nature as well as corruption.

Maj. Joe Pierce, an American Army officer working as an adviser to the Iraqi National Police as part of an Army program, said: ‘’I think there is a clear indication that there needs to be some kind of change in the National Police organization. Most of that has to be led by the Iraqi government, because it is a very top-fed type of system.

“If they want to institute change it really cannot come from, specifically, an outsider. It has to start from within, and if the Iraqi government decides that they need to clean up that organization, change will be a real thing and they can clean it up."

American officers have been trying to fix the police force since before 2006, which the military labeled “the year of the police,” a slogan meant to show their determination to fix what were, even then, longstanding sectarian problems.

In addition to questioning recommendations in the Jones commission report, Pentagon officials on Thursday also challenged the scathing assessment of political and military progress in Iraq by the Government Accountability Office; the officials said they had asked the agency to revise several of its assessments before making the findings public.

In a draft version of the report, the G.A.O. concluded that Iraq had failed to meet 13 of 18 military and political goals agreed to by President Bush. Pentagon officials are now arguing that two of the failing grades should be upgraded to passing, several Pentagon officials said.

The G.A.O. report was ordered by lawmakers as a parallel assessment to the Petraeus-Crocker report and the agency’s presumably more negative portrayal of the conditions in Iraq was immediately seized upon by Democrats as evidence of the need to switch course in Iraq.

The G.A.O. report is not due to be made public in final form until next week. In a statement, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, said that its conclusion provided more support for the case being made by Democrats that “a new direction in Iraq must begin immediately, before more American lives are lost and more taxpayer dollars wasted.”

On Friday President Bush is scheduled to meet with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss Iraq. Pentagon officials said the meeting would offer a chance for Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs, and the chiefs of the military services to provide their views about Iraq, as part of a process they have said is intended to present Mr. Bush with a broad range of views about the way forward in Iraq.

Several of the chiefs are expected to press for steep reductions in the force levels in Iraq over the next year out of concern that the current level of more than 160,000 troops imposes too large a strain on the military and leaves too few troops to respond to other contingencies, officials said.

In taking issue with the G.A.O. report, Pentagon officials said that Iraq had succeeded in delivering the promised number of army units to Baghdad as part of its contribution to the stepped-up security effort there, the officials said. The officials also challenged the G.A.O.’s finding that raised doubts about whether sectarian killings had fallen in Iraq in recent months.

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, defended the White House approach, saying: “The real question that people have is, What’s going on in Iraq? Are we making progress? Militarily, is the surge having an impact? The answer’s yes.”

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